True, but if you were to move into an apartment instead of a freestanding house, then you would reduce sprawl because you would have reduced demand for houses. Or, arguably, at some point you moved into your first house, which increased demand. Since then, your influence has been steady, but the aggregate effect of people moving out of their parents homes, out of apartments, out of dorms, and into houses increases the demand for standalone housing.
No offense taken on the other stuff. I, personally, don’t care for apartments either. But I realize that society as a whole would be better off if more people were willing to live in higher-density housing, and offering incentives in the other direction is probably not a great plan.
My point in bringing that up was that making home ownership less attractive isn’t the only solution to the problem of sprawl. The cause of sprawl is low-density housing, not whether people own or rent homes. Making single-use zoning and low-density land use less attractive through taxes would do more to combat sprawl than discouraging home ownership would.
A title search is not simply looking at a database to see who owns the property. It’s constructing a chain of title to determine what, if any, issues may arise before the person buying the property can buy it free of any liens or other encumberances. And that may require researching decades of records to determine what exists and if it is properly executed (it is not unheard of for a mortgage to encumber the wrong property, or for a release of mortgage to not be properly recorded, or for a deed to be incorrectly executed, etc.) While I said this can be conducted in about an hour, I did so with the assumption that there was no other work being conducted by that title examiner, which is rarely the case. Far better for a person to be thorough, and exact, with their search then to research your title as quick as possible, only to discover (later) that a person has a legally recognized right to collect money from you.
Real estate, it should be noted, is distinct from other forms of property. The standard law school metaphor is that property rights are a bundle of sticks, and you can give some away while retaining the rest. You can sell property, but you can also give up possessory rights to property you own (i.e. a lease), you can promise it to someone after you’re done with it (i.e. a remainder interest), you can restrict its use (i.e. a restrictive covenant), you can grant someone limited use for a specific purpose (i.e. an easement), etc.
When you buy property, you want to make sure that you are buying all of these rights. It’s not simply a matter of delivering a deed; you also want delivered any, and all, interest any other person has to use, control, influence, or collect on that property (practically, this doesn’t happen, since there will always be reservations allowing certain entities, like the utility companies, to get onto your property in order to deliver services). Thus, title searches are very important.
As to why it costs hundreds of dollars…I guess that’s what the market will bear. In light of the importance of the task, and the fact that the property being sold typically costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think it’s reasonable for a person to earn a couple hundred dollars to protect the investment.
Increased mobility is a two-edged sword, though- there’s a limit to how fast housing can be built in a newly booming area. Even with the current encouragement of home ownership, it can be hard to find rental housing in an area undergoing an economic boom, as anyone who tried to find housing in the Bay Area in the late 1990s could tell you.
And then you’d have many more vacant homes in areas where the jobs have gone away. Vacant buildings tend to attract crime, which will of course drive even more residents away.
You might get more segregation by income with less home ownership, too. Apartment complexes, at least the ones I’ve looked for apartments in, can explicitly say they won’t accept tenants without a certain minimum income (around here, usually a net income of 2.5 to 3.5 times the monthly rent). Homes for sale, on the other hand, are generally available to anyone who can get the money, whether from a lender, an inheritance, or some other way. Home ownership also provides a way for people with lower incomes to stay in a gentrifying neighborhood- the homeowners’ costs don’t go up as fast as rents in the area do.
We used to have tax relief on mortgage interest in the U.K., but it was removed many years ago. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about this than I (casdave?) can comment on its effect?
But it could be. If all encumbrances were required to be posted to the county database, then it would become a simple lookup, as long as the property has changed hands in recent times.
The point is, you don’t just do a title search. You purchase title insurance. That way, if someone screwed up somewhere along the line (possibly 100 years ago!) you are at least somewhat covered.
My only reason for posting to this thread was to respond to what I felt was a misunderstanding. That is, it was suggested that liens on property should be posted to a central database. I responded by saying that this was already done; the public records of each county provide a place to locate and identify such encumberances. Their existence, however, does not obviate the multitude of issues that a title search must account for, which have already been discussed. So, even though encumberances* are required to be posted to the public records (thereby putting others on notice of their existence), the process of researching title is not instantaneous, nor do I see how it could be.
*There are exceptions; some encumberances, like taxes, are recurring, and do not appear in public records. They remain easily accessible, however.
Canada also doesn’t have a mortgage interest tax deduction, but has homeownership rates similar to the United States.
I don’t know that increasing home ownership actually improves neighborhoods, but the forced savings involved in homeownership are, I think, a positive thing to the homeowner.